A Year of Growth and Scale: Reflecting on 2025 at Automated Creative

If 2024 was the year Automated Creative sharpened its value proposition, 2025 has been the year it scaled it. With exciting product evolutions, an expanding team with global reach, and contributions to the development of data driven marketing in the world of AI and automation, we’ve got a lot to be grateful for, and even more in the pipeline. Here are some of our highlights.

Automated Creative enables businesses to go to market quickly and at scale, supporting data-backed marketing decisions that drive cost-efficient conversions. To further empower marketing leaders, in 2025, we launched Creative Studio, our most significant product milestone.
This platform allows users to tweak, refine, and evolve creative directly and without needing to step outside the environment where insights are generated. It provides:

• Intuitive editing tools allowing users to adapt ad variations on the fly
• Rapid iteration features informed by real experiment data
• A seamless workflow between creative production, testing, and optimisation
• Brand governance guardrails to ensure control and consistency at scale

Creative Studio is a meaningful step forward: it bridges the gap between insight and action, enabling marketers to respond to audience signals quickly and meaningfully. Clients are already feeding back on how it has reduced their turnaround times, increased experiment throughput, and enabled their teams to be more involved in the creative process. All without complexity or jargon overwhelm.

Integrations That Boost Effectiveness
Additionally, in 2025, Automated Creative extended the reach of its platform with important capabilities:

• Improved Reddit integrations so that more ads can be implemented and learnt from, increasing the quality of future ad creative
• Improved Google integrations (CM, DV360 and Google Ads) to allow for trialling for more ads, informing campaign creative strategy; the results will be unified data, streamlined workflows, and improved measurement

Moreover, for Google Ads, we are also now able to pull ad previews back to our systems. This allows us to preview ads developed outside of AC for backtagging and analysis - adding to process effectiveness overall.

Part of growing along with our client base and ensuring a truly global reach has been our headcount development. Beyond simple capacity building, we welcomed seven key new people who each represent a strategic investment.

A large part of our new cohort sits in client-facing roles to reflect our commitment to long-term creative intelligence partnerships. Eight years into our journey, we are serving global brands at speed, without compromising on quality and human input, and with consistency and depth.

Automated Creative is now operating in the United States and Canada, Singapore, and Latin America, in addition to our United Kingdom headquarters. This gives us a wide reach and a crucial mix of global knowledge and local nuances for multinational brands - essential for those running Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and Retail Media campaigns at scale.

Focus on Latin America
One of the year’s standout developments is AC’s increased presence in Latin America, where digital acceleration and creative diversity make this region one of the world’s most compelling markets.

Leading this momentum is Caro, AC’s new LATAM Client Executive. She brings deep regional expertise and an instinct for scaling creative solutions across culturally complex markets. Her arrival unlocks AC’s ability to run experiments natively in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking territories. We’re pleased to now offer a capability that we know our global clients will find invaluable.

We’ve levelled up what we deliver, brought in more customers, and kept building tools that automate the stuff nobody wakes up excited to do. But the best part about growing the tech? The humans behind it. We’ve added brilliant new people and somehow, in seven years, gone from 3 of us in Alex’s kitchen to 30 employees across four countries.
Yes, we’re an automation company. We love making work faster, smoother, and less painful. But the people are the engine. Automation doesn’t invent itself, improve itself, or care about customers — our team does. So my real win this year has been the talent, the heart, and seeing young talent grow with us. If this is what 30 looks like, I can’t wait to see what’s next.

-- Rhoda Sell, Chief Operating Officer

2025 has also seen Automated Creative gain increased industry visibility, with its founders and leaders contributing to conversations that shape the future of creative, data, and the evolving media landscape.

On Stage: AI & Creative Insights and Talks
We’ve worked closely with MAD//Fest for several years, delivering highly anticipated annual presentations and discussions. In 2025, AC Founder Tom Ollerton led a session focused on the intersection of AI, human creativity, and how brands can differentiate in an era of infinite ad formats but diminishing attention. His “AI Slop or AI Gold?” panel conversation highlighted where we can find gold with the help of human guidance, strong creative oversight, ethical guardrails, and understanding of AI’s limitations (especially hallucinations, bias, quality control).

Global Head of Creative Strategy Amy Wright also took to the stage to discuss issues around AI web crawlers, publisher rights, legal grey areas, and when AI makes a good co-pilot, in conversations with Mumsnet CEO Justine Roberts and L’Oréal Digital Director Ekaterina Golovanova.

In fact, Amy and Rob Ronayne (Head of Client Success) were the hosts of MAD//Fest’s AI & Creativity Stage during the three-day festival, exploring how brands can blend automation, data and human insight to drive better creative performance.

In the Media: Contributing to the Debate on Data Driven Marketing
Across 2025, AC leaders were also featured in industry press, reinforcing our role at the front of data driven creative marketing. Amy was quoted in Performance Marketing World, offering expert perspective on why brands can no longer rely on discounting alone during peak shopping period. She argued instead for agile, data-led creative optimisation in “Peak shopping times for 2025: Why discounting alone won’t save Christmas.”

And, after publishing Automated Creative’s second book, Using Creativity and Data in Marketing, Tom embarked on a tour to keep pushing the conversation on how marketers can make the two work together. In an article for MAD//Fest, Tom drew from the book research to highlight how leading brands such as Bose, McDonald’s, Mars, and Mastercard fuse creative ideas with data validation to maximise impact.

Our People: Showcasing Our World-Class Approach
Our people approach was also put on the spotlight: our Chief Operating Officer Rhoda was a guest on the Great People Interview Series run by the London School of Digital Business. She shared how we build a culture of psychological safety, kindness, and operational clarity, enabling our team to work efficiently with data. Her account of our “Work Nice or Go Home” philosophy was amplified across social channels, positioning her as a leading voice on how culture, structure, and emotional intelligence elevate a company’s ability to harness data and AI effectively.

All these elements underline the fact that, at Automated Creative, we don’t just produce marketing results; we are shaping the broader conversation about how modern creative should be built, tested, and understood.

Automated Creative has been working in AI and automation since 2017, long before the current hype cycle, and yet 2025 has been the first year where everyone seems comfortable admitting the truth we’ve known for a while: nobody really knows what AI will look like next year. The pace has outstripped prediction. The ground is shifting under all of us at once.
For me, that uncertainty isn’t scary, it’s energising. It puts everyone back in beginner mode, which is where the real learning happens. The only real advantage any of us have now is how openly we share what we’re discovering. That’s why we experiment publicly, speak on stages, publish what we find, and stay relentlessly curious.
If there’s a thread that runs through all our thought leadership this year, it’s this: insight matters more than certainty. In a moment defined by volatility, the brands that will win are the ones willing to learn out loud. And that’s exactly where we plan to stay.

-- Tom Ollerton, Founder

The hallmark of 2025 for Automated Creative has been clarity: in product direction, geographic strategy, operating rhythm, and brand visibility. We are scaling our value across the globe with a strengthened team, important contributions to the debate on the future of data driven marketing and - most importantly - with new platform capabilities to help brands go to market quicker, more confidently, and more effectively.

As the marketing landscape continues to evolve, with creative performance becoming both more measurable and more complex, Automated Creative is uniquely positioned to help brands navigate that tension: using data to enhance and focus creative, not constrain it.